Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  Dobell reached under the counter and held up Soultrane.

  “Fine. I’ll take that too. Cheque OK?”

  §93

  He walked home, untroubled and unobserved via Brewer Street. If one shop could constitute a Little Italy, then London’s Little Italy was Lina Stores, which had opened in the last year of the war, not long after Italy, with commendable good sense, had changed sides and hundreds, if not thousands, of POWs and internees had been released, and one could once again get a decent Italian meal in the middle of the city.

  A couple of hours later, armed with fresh spaghetti, a chunk of Parmesan, tinned tomatoes (it was November, after all), a bulb of foreign “nunnion” and twelve ounces of mince, he had rustled up spag bol for two, and he and Foxx were sprawled on the sofa with the last glasses to be tipped from a bottle of Chianti.

  He’d put on the Miles Davis.

  Foxx did not care for it.

  “It’s a bit harsh. Austere even.”

  “Yep. Let me find something a bit more relaxing.”

  He put on the Stan Getz LP.

  “Oh, don’t you just love saxophones?” she said.

  Troy said nothing.

  Waited until Stan and Oscar had reached “Bewitched.” Until he could hear the unuttered “wild again” in the mind’s ear.

  “Over the next few days … let me know if you notice anything odd.”

  Foxx was curled into a ball, her favourite position, head on his lap. She twisted onto her back so she could see his face.

  “Eh?”

  “Just anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m suspended. Subject to a Special Branch investigation. I’m being tailed. They may stick to me, but they might also follow you, and they may try and turn over the house when we’re out. Illegal, but they may try all the same. Just tell me if you notice anything out of place. Objects not where you left them, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh bloody hell! It’s that bugger, Burgess, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh God. I wish you’d come home with me and not met up with him.”

  “What’s done is done. Besides. He was a friend. Traitor or not, I would not have refused to see him.”

  “And now you’re a suspect? … they think you’re a traitor too?”

  “They’re clutching at straws. Looking for someone to blame.”

  “Are we in trouble?”

  Troy’s second first-person-plural pronoun of the day. He might never feel lonely again.

  “No. If I can’t see this one off I’m a poor excuse for a copper. We may run into extra time, I may kick the odd penalty, but believe me, I will score.”

  “I hate it when you use sporting metaphors.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t know a silly mid-off from a centre-half.”

  “I’ll win all the same.”

  “You’d better,” she said, and squirmed back into position.

  §94

  More time passed with no further word from Westcott than Troy would have anticipated. Westcott was stringing him out, and in turn Troy was stringing out Westcott’s men. Plod and Plod followed him around London, and he took particular delight in long lunches in Soho that kept them standing around in the cold, no doubt bursting to pee. One day he managed to stretch lunch at L’Escargot out to three hours, and the next day managed to read half of Camus’s L’Étranger leaning against a bookcase in Foyles while it rained buckets outside.

  It was the next Friday afternoon before Westcott called him at home.

  “I thought we might meet for another session after work today.”

  Ah, so he’d now done enough homework to feel he could tackle Troy more forcefully? This would be a tougher session. There’d be no gaps in his knowledge, he’d have Troy’s curriculum vitae off by heart—but, equally, he’d have learnt nothing from the followers.

  “I’m not at work, Mr. Westcott. As well you know. I appear to be on leave and at four o’clock today I shall be setting off to spend some of it in the country.”

  “Hertfordshire?”

  “Yes. Mimram, to be exact.”

  “Of course,” said Westcott, who probably knew what newspapers Troy read, where he got his hair cut, and so most certainly knew where his country house was.

  It might be impossible to put Westcott off, but distinctly possible to control both time and place … to open with the white pawn.

  “Look, why don’t you come down for lunch tomorrow?”

  Troy counted to five while Westcott hesitated. He wasn’t going to say no, he’d just rather not say yes. Troy thought an outright refusal would be out of character.

  “That … er … that sounds fine, Mr. Troy.”

  “Jolly good. King’s Cross to Welwyn, change to the Branch Line and get off at Tewin Water. The trains aren’t frequent, but I believe there’s a 9:45 that connects rather well and will get you to Tewin Water around 11:30. I’ll have you met at the station. We can talk before lunch, and after lunch, if the weather holds up, we can take a walk around.”

  §95

  Troy called his brother and told him not to show up until Saturday evening.

  “It’s not really all that convenient, you know. I have constituency surgery in Welwyn tomorrow morning from ten until noon.”

  “Then find a pub and prop up the bar for a couple of hours. Don’t show up here before three at the earliest.”

  “Freddie, what are you up to?”

  “You would not thank me for telling you.”

  “Fine. Be like that.”

  He’d tell Rod sooner or later, preferably when the storm had evaporated from the teacup, preferably when there was some advantage in telling him. Now was not the moment.

  §96

  He let the Fat Man collect Westcott, let him prep a thoroughly London, utterly urban copper with pig tales. Westcott was impossible to intimidate—the Garrick had proved that—but it might just be possible to divert him, confuse him, disorient him in much the way the Larkin family did with the tax inspector in The Darling Buds of May. Troy had had many a moment when he had wished the Fat Man would just shut up. This was not one of them.

  Westcott stepped from the car, trying to smile, poorly concealing his boredom and his bewilderment.

  “I’ve just heard all about raising pigs in the middle of Chelsea, during the Blitz.”

  “I know,” said Troy. “Just when you think you’ve heard every Blitz tale, along comes one you’d never expect.”

  “I was in the Home Guard. I thought I’d seen everything.”

  The Fat Man winked at Troy from behind Westcott’s back.

  “I’ll go and nudge cook along, young Fred. I’ll give you and yer pal a shout just before she dishes up the jubbly.”

  Westcott looked around. The long, winding drive lined with leafless trees, the lawn gently rolling to the river, still wet with dew, and the house itself, rendered ramshackle with the accretions of many owners and many generations.

  Then he turned to Troy.

  “I feel I have to ask, Mr. Troy, but we are alone?”

  “My brother, you mean? No, he won’t be joining us. It would be quite wrong for two police officers to talk as we must talk in front of a man to whom both of us might be answerable after the next election. And, who knows, the Prime Minister might call one any day now. After all, we’ve never had it so good, have we?”

  “And …”

  “Miss Foxx is out shopping. The only other people are the driver who just picked you up—he’ll take lunch with us but then vanish into his potting shed—and the cook. She goes home before two, so yes, we’ll be alone.”

  He showed Westcott into his study. It had been his father’s study before it was his, and in almost fifteen years Troy had left next to no mark on it. It was still a room belonging to another century, another man, but most certainly not another country.

  He’d lit a fire, a
nd they sat on either side of it, much as they’d done at the Garrick.

  “You seem to attract trouble, Mr. Troy?”

  “I know.”

  “In fact, people seem to die around you.”

  Yes, this was going to be a much tougher session.

  “I’m not even sure where to begin,” Westcott said.

  Of course he was sure. He hadn’t even bothered to take out a notebook. Just his packet of full-strength fags. He’d got Troy’s track record off by heart. Asking to be coaxed was just a ploy.

  Troy pushed an ashtray along the hearth to him.

  “Try chronology.”

  “In 1940, you were part of a team responsible for the internment of aliens, led by Chief Inspector Steerforth. His report doesn’t show you at your best.”

  “Steerforth was an unconscionable bastard. He assaulted me twice in the course of that operation. I made no complaint, but I was glad when it was all over and I could get back to the Murder Squad. I was only on Steerforth’s team because I speak a couple of foreign languages, neither of which I got to use, and because I’d been a beat bobby in Stepney, which is where most of the aliens were at that time.”

  “Steerforth disappeared without trace shortly afterwards.”

  Indeed, Steerforth had disappeared, but not without trace—Troy knew exactly where he was. Under the remains of an East End synagogue. One day they might find what was left of him, but as several magnesium incendiaries, capable of igniting steel, had followed Steerforth into the pit, Troy doubted they’d find so much as a tooth.

  “As I recall, he disappeared during the Blitz. So many people did.”

  “And you worked with Walter Stilton on the same operation. In ‘41, Stilton was murdered.”

  “Walter was shot by a German agent, whose cover was that of an American officer attached to their embassy. I investigated Walter’s death, but the case was solved by another American officer, a Captain Cormack. All of which was in my report.”

  “In ‘44, Detective Sergeant Miller of Special Branch was shot in Manchester Square.”

  “I investigated that too. If people die around me, as you put it, don’t you think it might seem that way because my job is to investigate suspicious death? And if you intend to bring up every case I’ve ever investigated we’ll be here till midnight.”

  “I’m focussing on the deaths of fellow officers. And you were told not to investigate Miller’s death.”

  “Only by your people. Onions had other ideas. I can quote him word for word. ‘Nobody shoots coppers on the streets of London and tells me to look the other way.’ I followed orders. Took awhile, but I arrested the killer in 1948.”

  “And caused some diplomatic ripples.”

  “John Baumgarner had no diplomatic immunity, and since I could never be certain he’d pulled the trigger in person, I charged him with the murder of one Sydney Edelman, tailor of Stepney Green—a crime to which Jack Wildeve, who is now a chief inspector under me, was a witness—not the murder of Sergeant Miller. If you feel so inclined, that case is still open.”

  “In ‘56, you were part of the team monitoring Khrushchev’s visit. A team led by Inspector Cobb. Cobb also disappeared. This time without the cover of an air raid.”

  “I gather that was some time after Khrushchev went home. I was on other cases by then. Cases, I regret to say, that are also still open two years later. Cobb’s disappearance never was my case. It would only be my case even now if a body turned up, and if your people asked me in.”

  Of course, Troy had killed Cobb. He had no idea where the body was and as long as it never turned up, he didn’t care. Cobb had been another “unconscionable bastard”—so many of them were.

  “To single out my involvement with dead coppers, particularly coppers killed in wartime, may be a way of cataloguing my sins, but it is to lose focus on what I do. I catch killers, Mr. Westcott, and while one or two have slipped through my fingers, my track record is better than most.”

  “I can’t dispute that, Mr. Troy, nor would I want to, but as the issue at hand is, as you might put it, ‘yet another dead copper,’ in the shape of Mr. Blaine, you’d expect me to review your cases in that particular light, would you not?”

  “I most certainly would expect, but I can hear that dirty word ‘coincidence’ muttering in the wings—”

  The Fat Man appeared in the doorway. “Grub’s up.”

  “And now I expect you to eat lunch.”

  §97

  After bangers and mash and beer, Troy invited Westcott to put on his overcoat and take a walk. He led him through the vegetable garden, where brussels sprouts leaned like Pisa, and the bright green tips of garlic thrust up through the loam like frogs’ tongues, and down to the bank of the river. A change of venue and a change of tack.

  “I suppose I might have begun with this question a while ago, but I didn’t. Politics, Mr. Troy.”

  “My politics?”

  “Yes. Never pays to presume too much about a man’s politics. Pays to ask.”

  “Of course. If we all went by the old school tie, we’d get so much of it wrong. Just as we did with Burgess.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t have any politics.”

  “Then what do you believe?”

  “I believe in the pursuit, arrest, and fair trial of the criminal. I believe in the blindfolded lady atop the Old Bailey. I believe in justice. I’d be in the wrong job if I didn’t.”

  “Quite so. But you vote?”

  “I do.”

  “And how do you vote?”

  “I vote British, Mr. Westcott. The Soviet Union puts up no candidates in rural England.”

  Westcott could not stop himself from smiling at this.

  “But,” Troy went on. “Since you’ve asked what no gentleman should of another … I vote for my brother.”

  “So you vote Labour?”

  “No, Mr. Westcott, I vote ‘Family.’”

  Troy had cued Westcott. Inadvertently he had offered the perfect sequitur.

  “Ah … I would like to ask about your family, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ve nothing to hide, Mr. Westcott, indeed much of my background is common knowledge. A famous father, a famous brother—I am the most anonymous member of the family.”

  “You’re too modest. You might well be the best-known copper in the land, after Mr. Fabian of course.”

  “And Dixon of Dock Green.”

  “Real coppers, Mr. Troy, real coppers. And you’re not the most anonymous member of the family—there’s your uncle.”

  “Nikolai? Well … he’s always held a very ambivalent position with your people. They accept him without trusting him. He has worked for our secret services without ever being one of them. Yet every shade of government since Baldwin has relied on him to interpret scientific data coming out of the Soviet Union.”

  “Do you really need to wonder why? Until 1951, he had a soap box at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. He was a rabble-rouser.”

  “And you sent Plod to watch him, didn’t you? Well, if you’d sent someone with half a brain, and if they’d listened to what Nikolai had to say, you’d know damn well he wasn’t preaching Communism, that he has no more love for the Soviet Union than he had for the Romanovs, and that he is a follower first and foremost of Count Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, a well-known pacifist, and secondly of Prince Kropotkin, a proponent of co-operative movements, author of Fields, Factories and Workshops … both of whom were spied on by the Russian secret police in their day—and both of whom are rather bad for rabble-rousing as few amongst the rabble have ever heard of them. My uncle is undeterred by futility. No, Mr. Westcott, Nikolai Troitsky is no one you need suspect of anything, no one who has ever been seriously suspected of anything, and, in the words of an idiot schoolmaster who once taught me, the policy of our secret services seems to be ‘don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.’”

  “We had him vetted at the time of the aliens scare.”<
br />
  “You had me vetted too. We both passed. You even interned my brother. How stupid can it get?”

  “A lot stupider than that, I’m afraid.”

  “Then let me save you time and stupidity. Since this all appears to be about my family, let me assure you of my family’s loyalty. My uncle has opposed every Russian government since the time of Nicholas II—Kerensky, Lenin, Stalin, that bloke no one remembers, and now Khrushchev. He has been loyal to his adopted country for nearly fifty years. My brother is so loyal to England he risked his life God knows how many times during the war and emerged a highly decorated RAF hero … by your own admission, a Battle of Britain legend … he may well be Prime Minister one day. My father, my mother, and my uncle were all born in Russia. A fact which the small minds of MI5 can never cope with. My father was born a Russian but died a loyal Englishman, quoting Yeats in his last words. I was born in this house. I am his only English-born child. My mother called me her ‘little Englander’—and I’ve never been to Russia.

  “Years ago, my father told me and my brother that however English we were, we would always be regarded as Russian, a suspect condition in itself, the same condition Moura Budberg was in, and how wonderfully she exploited that. He said that if he, Rod, or I, any of us, were to happen to consort with a Russian spy, we must never forget that he is a Russian spy. I happened to consort with Guy Burgess. Coincidence or opportunism … whichever—I never forgot what Guy was for a moment.”

  “You know, you used the word loyal three or four times just now … but not about yourself. Now, why would that be?”

  “I don’t feel any necessity to state my loyalty. I do my job.”

  And he kicked himself. He’d almost got ratty with Westcott and that would be a hostage to fortune.

  “Johnson,” he said, burying the annoyance he felt.

  “Johnson?”

  “Samuel Johnson, in the dictionary—’Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ I would not be able to state mine without the echo of Dr. Johnson, I fear.”

  “But … since you bring up scoundrels. Burgess. Let’s go back to Burgess. How long have you known Burgess was a spy?”